Speed-up backups with pgBackRest asynchronous archiving

Backing up a database with high write-ahead logs (WAL) generation can be rather slow, because PostgreSQL archiving process is sequential, without any parallelism or batching. In extreme cases backup can be even considered unsuccessful by the Operator because of the timeout.

The pgBackRest tool used by the Operator can, if necessary, solve this problem by using the WAL asynchronous archiving feature.

You can set up asynchronous archiving in your storage configuration file for pgBackRest. Turn on the additional archive-async flag, and set the process-max value for archive-push and archive-get commands. Your storage configuration file may look as follows:

s3.conf

[global]
repo2-s3-key=REPLACE-WITH-AWS-ACCESS-KEY
repo2-s3-key-secret=REPLACE-WITH-AWS-SECRET-KEY
repo2-storage-verify-tls=n
repo2-s3-uri-style=path
archive-async=y
spool-path=/pgdata

[global:archive-get]
process-max=2

[global:archive-push]
process-max=4

No modifications are needed aside of setting these additional parameters. You can find more information about WAL asynchronous archiving in gpBackRest official documentation and in this blog post .

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Last update: 2025-03-30